Materials
New tech is watched closely, but firms can be guilty of being risk- averse and waiting for others to move first.
titanium, is particularly useful in load-bearing applications, says Bandyopadhyay. When implants become infected and need to be removed, physicians typically reflect on how specific procedures within the surgery could have been improved, Mitra says. “But instead of thinking in retrospect while you’re already on the way to the bedside application, take a step back and see if you can do something while the material is still in the bench stage – that’s what we aim to do.” According to some historians, people used copper to treat wounds as far back as 2,000BC, and scientists
have long known about the metal’s antimicrobial properties. This poses the question of why the medical device industry hasn’t explored alternative metal combinations like Bandyopadhyay and Mitra’s. Bandyopadhyay acknowledges the healthcare industry – especially orthopaedic device makers – is slow to adopt new and better technologies, but says that it eventually does.
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“In the US alone, we used about 200,000 3D-printed porous metal implants in 2023. We started talking about porous metal implants about 20 years ago, and I still remember my first-generation conversations with various groups and I was discouraged by everyone,” he says, adding that he was told that 3D-printed metallic devices would never be used in the human body. The medical device industry follows news of new technologies very closely, Bandyopadhyay says, but companies typically wait for someone else to take the first step to avoid risk. Well-funded R&D departments were once a part of most large medical device corporations, notes Bandyopadhyay, but most now employ a different strategy for implementing new technologies. “Their business model is, ‘let’s go ahead and buy the small companies because they have taken the risk, have vetted the ideas, taken a concept to a product line, and now most likely have a device approved’. It’s a lot cheaper for them to buy those small corporations and incorporate their product into their product lines than trying to look at a hundred different ideas and see if one or two of them are making sense or not.” Bandyopadhyay says he and Mitra are fortunate that their novel implant has proven to be successful and predicts within the next three years we’re likely to see “hundreds” of scientific papers exploring similar concepts. Then, multiple companies in Asia, Europe and the US will explore antimicrobial metals for implants, raise funds and one of them will at least make one product, he predicts. “And once that happens, and once that company is sold for $20, $30, $40 million, you’ll start to see all the large corporations say, ‘okay, fine’.” ●
Medical Device Developments /
www.nsmedicaldevices.com
Sergey Nivens/
Shutterstock.com
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